Out of ~7.7 billion people on this planet today, roughly 1.4 billion of them live in China. It was hard to ignore China when they were going through a rough time economically (China after the First Industrial Revolution as well as China during Mao Zedong’s regime, two shameless plugs that I think you’ll find useful)… let’s not even talk about today’s China, with a GDP per capita that grew 25x (NOT a typo) since Mao’s death.

What I’m trying to say is that a trend has been set in motion that is ridiculously hard to stop and while there will be bumps in the road (remember, the US had its own share of problems until it became the economic superpower it is today!) as well as difficulties to overcome (the huge discrepancy between the economy of the highly industrialized regions of China compared to let’s say Western China), it’s only a matter of time until China will become the world’s largest economy.

And even once that happens, there will be PLENTY of room to grow, since its GDP per capita will still not be unbelievably high.

As such, I don’t care what industries you’re in, opportunities in China are and will be all over the place.

The trillion dollar question is this, however:

What exactly are you doing about it?

Time and time again, we become the masters of hindsight, the people who say “I knew all along that XYZ will be big” but made exactly $0 because they didn’t take any form of meaningful action to get a slice (no matter how small) of that pie.

What can you do?

Well, it depends.

I for one, as mentioned in an earlier post, am learning Chinese.

If you don’t want to do that, no problem. Some of you might decide to brush up on your history, especially Asian history. Great idea!

Others might choose to travel to China every now and then, make connections and see where that leads. Excellent!

As perhaps the architect of today’s China (Deng Xiaoping) said:

“It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice!”

… a huge shift from Mao’s less than flexible ideology and wise words to live by, if you ask me.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter that much what you do as long as you promise yourself you’ll at least think of something to take advantage of this monster of a trend… which isn’t going anywhere. For a very in-depth perspective on all things China, I’d recommend checking out China Fund Dot Com when you get a chance to.

Half the battle is showing up 😉

Good luck!